of a house on an unpaved road, followed by a shot of police officers traipsing through a forest with German shepherds. I scratch an itch on my wrist.
“Sullivan was first reported missing ten days ago by her wife, Rita Diaz,” the reporter says in a voiceover. “Diaz told police that Sullivan left for her usual morning walk around five thirty a.m. on June seventh and did not return.”
“Where’s this?” I ask. The area looks heavily wooded, not like you’d find around here.
“Maine,” Eric says.
“Maine? Why are they talking about it in Boston?”
He glances at me. “It’s Astrid Sullivan.”
“Who?”
The reporter continues: “The timing of Sullivan’s disappearance—almost exactly twenty years since her abduction from a small New Hampshire town on June 24, 2000—has residents of Ridgeway concerned that this is the work of Sullivan’s original abductor, who was never caught.”
I scratch my wrist again as a new photo appears on the screen. It’s the same woman as before, evident by her mane of curly red hair, only she’s much younger. A teenager. I set my plate on the coffee table and lean forward. There’s something about the freckles sprayed like splatter paint across the girl’s nose that makes me squint at the TV.
“Hold on.” I reach for the remote and press pause. The screen freezes right as the picture enlarges to fill the frame. The girl has a wide face with high cheekbones, a closed-lipped smile that borders on a smirk. Her freckles fan out onto her cheeks, and there’s a rogue one below the arch of her left eyebrow that’s darker than the rest.
“I think I know her,” I say.
Eric looks at me as his mouth closes around his fork. “Well yeah,” he says, chewing. “It’s Astrid Sullivan.”
“You keep saying that. But who is she?”
His brow furrows. “Are you serious? She’s that girl who was kidnapped twenty years ago.”
“They said that. But why would I know who she is?”
“Everyone knows her. It was national news.”
“Why?”
Eric shakes his head a little. “You really don’t remember?”
“Twenty years ago, I was only twelve,” I remind him.
“And I was thirteen,” he says, “but I still remember.”
“Well, I didn’t have TV growing up. You know Ted and Mara.”
He shrugs. “Still. It happened in your state. Down in Virginia, everyone was talking about it, so I can’t imagine that Cedar somehow missed the story.”
I stare at the girl’s face, trying to remember where I’ve seen her before. It feels like trying to remember a dream. “What is the story?” I ask.
Eric sets his plate beside mine. As he speaks, he kneads my back with his knuckles. It’s a gesture I usually love, but the itch on my wrist demands so much attention, I can hardly feel his hand.
“She was missing for weeks,” he says. “She was fourteen, I think, and she disappeared during some party her parents were having. The front yard was supposedly packed with people—but nobody saw what happened to her. And then, like a month later, they found her on the side of the road a couple blocks from her house. She was blindfolded and drugged and said she’d been kept in a basement that whole time by some guy in a mask.”
Girls who disappear. Kidnappers. Masks.
My scratching reminds me of the crickets in Cedar. Growing up, I would listen to them through my window screen at night, marveling at how their rhythm was the same as Ted’s when he clawed at his psoriasis. I have not inherited my father’s skin condition, but sometimes I itch.
“And this happened in New Hampshire?” I ask.
“Yeah, hang on.” Eric grabs his phone, opens an app, and types. “This says it was Foster, New Hampshire, which is…” He pulls up a map and zooms in. “Maybe forty-five miles from Cedar?”
Astrid’s eyes stare out at me from the TV. They’re green like the oak leaves that hem in my childhood home, and the longer I look at them, the more I feel the need to look away.
“I’ve never heard about any of this,” I say, “but I really think I know her from somewhere.”
Eric pulls his plate back onto his lap, takes a bite of tomato and feta. “Her face was all over the newspapers. There’s no way you could have missed it. Everyone was obsessed with the story since her reappearance was so weird. Oh—also…” He eats another forkful before continuing. “She just had a memoir come out, so she’s been doing a bunch of publicity for it. I think she was on Good Morning America recently.”